Pulmonary Rehabilitation in Interstitial Lung Disease
Mrinmayee Koltharkar
Abstract
Interstitial Lung Disease (ILD) is a diverse group of over 150 disorders characterized by varying degrees of fibrosis and inflammation of the lung parenchyma or interstitium. At present, the available pharmacotherapeutic modalities are ineffective in stopping the natural course of ILD, have plenty of side effects and remain only as palliative measures making lung transplantation the sole modality to show benefit in terms of mortality. The need of pulmonary rehabilitation in ILD has only been recently realized. Much of the work on pulmonary rehabilitation work has been done on COPD and data has been applied to other chronic respiratory conditions. While ATS/ERS joint committee in their statement on ILD subgroup have given weak positive recommendation on pulmonary rehabilitation due to lack of strong evidence, as more research in this field is desired.